LudoBites 5.0, Pop-Up Dining in Los Angeles

Ludovic Lefebvre and his wife, Kristine, preside over LudoBites 5.0 at Gram & Papa’s in Los Angeles.Credit
Axel Koester for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES

IT was just after dark in this city’s desolate downtown, with the tents of the homeless rising in shadows along Maple Avenue and trash skittering across Olympic Boulevard in a light breeze. The only real sounds to be heard were the soft beep-boops of people locking car doors with remote keys.

They had driven down from Brentwood, from Silver Lake and the Hollywood Hills to park on East Ninth Street near one of the only lighted storefronts for blocks. They walked from their vehicles with wine and greeted one another at the entrance with nods and smiles of recognition. They were members of the same audience, patrons of the same art.

A bring-your-own-bottle event called LudoBites 5.0 had brought them here, a guerrilla restaurant run by the itinerant Burgundy-born chef Ludovic Lefebvre and his wife, Kristine Lefebvre. It opened on July 21 and runs through Sept. 3.

During the day, the LudoBites space is Gram & Papa’s, a breakfast-and-lunch joint with a hearty organic menu of eggs and sandwiches, soups and salads that it serves on paper plates. The Lefebvres rent the room each weeknight, and transform it into a casual monument to fine dining, a bistro temple.

Reservations to LudoBites are the summer’s must-have accessory in this restaurant-mad city, written about on Twitter and blogs and heralded in the pages of LA Weekly, where the critic Jonathan Gold has lavished praise on it. But they are not totally impossible to get. I joined the crowds twice last week, an anonymous East Coast interloper interested in all the fuss.

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Ludovic Lefebvre prepares potato mousseline.Credit
Axel Koester for The New York Times

The Lefebvres arrive every afternoon with a crew of paid staff and students, 14 in all. They bring in silverware and plates, wineglasses and LudoBites posters, candles, more candles and a great deal of food. Mr. Lefebvre cooks. Mrs. Lefebvre manages the house. (“He’s the artist, and I execute,” she told The Los Angeles Times in May.)

There are 14 dishes available, appetizers, entrees and desserts that range from $4 to $34. Many customers order all of them: a series of vaguely Asian, deeply French and fairly Californian experiments that manage at once to be both simple in flavor and amazingly complex in execution.

The whole point of LudoBites is surprise. So this food is utterly different from anything that was on the menu for LudoBites 4.0 or earlier, anything that Mr. Lefebvre has offered before — and, most likely, anything that the diner has ever eaten.

A poached egg, for instance, arrives after being cooked at 147 degrees, so that the yolk and the white have exactly the same texture. It is served within a potato mousseline of astonishing lightness, over a thin chorizo crumble, the bowl dressed with a drizzle of sausage fat and a few edible flowers. The Lefebvres charge $14 for it. If the dish were served at a drive-through on Sunset Boulevard, they could get $20. Its effect is narcotic.

Cheese cupcakes are on the menu, too, the sugar replaced with Emmenthal and Cantal, the frosting with chicken-liver mousse, with kumquats and cornichons on the side: a lunatic take on an American trend. Naan, the Indian bread, comes scented with vadouvan, a spice mixture that tastes just like a garam masala interpreted by a French chef, with plenty of shallots, and a ramekin of coconut milk whipped with butter into something new and exciting.

Raw wagyu arrives torn and tangled in a bowl with dried miso and soft somen noodles in a peanut vinaigrette, dressed with candied watermelon and mint, with a tiny quail egg for taste and texture. Grilled squid is served with heirloom tomatoes, black rice, red onions cooked soft with yuzu, seaweed tartare and a dashi broth that provides a miracle of umami, with mouth feel and flavor to spare.

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Raw beef with noodles.Credit
Axel Koester for The New York Times

You can also get a large and somewhat intimidating plate of braised and grilled octopus, peppered with smoked paprika and served with oregano, a grilled hazelnut-studded polenta cake, pineapple aioli and a gelée made from the octopus braise combined with piment d’Espelette — Basque Jell-O, in essence, fiery and raw.

And, rounding out the appetizer courses (pace yourself!), a deconstructed goat-cheese salad is reconstructed as soup: the cheese sitting on top of a round of brioche in a bowl filled with frisée and batons of bacon and surrounded by cubes of green apple and marvelously discordant tofu, the whole thing draped in lardo. A waiter pours a paper cup of chicken stock thickened with yet more goat cheese around the whole — and the lardo melts in the heat. It is crazy, and sublime.

The Lefebvres are something close to celebrities in Los Angeles. He was the chef at a well-regarded temple of French haute cuisine here, L’Orangerie (since closed), then at another, Bastide, where he was lauded by the local press and the Mobil Guide. He appeared on “Top Chef Masters,” playing the moody French bad boy, tattooed and guttural.

She was a lawyer who wore suits as a contestant on “The Apprentice” and, as a model for Playboy in 2007, nothing at all. They met at L’Orangerie, where she caught his eye on her way to dinner with another man. She mistook the amuse-bouche a waiter brought to her table as a gift sent expressly to her by the chef. They have been married for more than a decade.

The LudoBites show has been running on and off for three years, in spaces as diverse as the Breadbar, a bakery in the shadow of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; the Royal/T art space and cafe in Culver City; and a bright red truck serving fried chicken at the Los Angeles Street Food Festival, in February. LudoBites 4.0 was at Gram & Papa’s from April through May. Every night was sold out.

The same is true for LudoBites 5.0. More than 3,000 people tried to secure reservations within the first five minutes of the first day they were available at the Lefebvres’ Web site, ludobites.com, crashing the system. A subsequent run on another reservations site likewise slowed the process to a crawl.

“It was a nightmare for everyone,” Mrs. Lefebvre wrote in an e-mail to one unhappy would-be diner.

But this is Los Angeles. Calls can be made here, names invoked, the favor bank raided. (It’s Chinatown, Jake.)

Less romantically, you can send desperate e-mails to the restaurant’s Web site (which yielded a prime reservation for one friend of mine). Or you can monitor Mrs. Lefebvre’s Twitter account, @frenchchefwife. “Peeps are killing me with last minute cancellations,” she wrote on July 26. “Have a 4-top available at 6:15. Any downtown takers?”

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Working anonymously on both fronts, with the help of friends I was able to secure tables for two nights last week, and managed to consume the entire 14-course menu both times. (My table eschewed the cheese plate on the first night. The waiter good-naturedly mocked us for our weakness.)

The entrees at LudoBites are, in contrast to current East Coast restaurant trends, reliably as good as the appetizers that precede them.

A giant slab of foie gras was boldly covered in hoisin sauce, a dead-simple combination of incredible flavor, especially combined with a luscious miso-marinated eggplant terrine. Wild striped bass was sautéed and served over piped puréed cauliflower — and under shaved cauliflower — with black garlic and a panna cotta made with lemon and curry. A confit of pork belly was served with a Thai salad Mr. Lefebvre calls “raw choucroute” and a quenelle of mustard ice cream — another grand notion, spicy and cool.

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LudoBites 3.0 at Royal/T in Culver City.Credit
Eugene Lee

Finally, steamed duck worked beautifully: soft duck, under a crispy-soft skin of sauce (or sauce of skin: the duck’s exterior had been roasted, then puréed). A perfect poached peach, passed over the grill, came with it, served with peach’s best collaborator: balsamic vinegar.

For dessert there was an elegant French take on S’mores, with guacamole sorbet beside it (say what?), and a caramel soufflé of uncommon excellence, paired with super-salty fleur de sel ice cream and grapefruit — acid to work the angle between the two.

The first night eating all this was an amazement. The second was about 10 times better — each dish perfectly executed, with every flavor in place, every temperature correct, every plate a fully realized piece of art. It was only the fifth night the restaurant had been open.

Mr. Lefebvre came out into the dining room at the end of that night to talk to those diners who remained. This was not because he recognized them (or me) particularly. It was simply downtown Los Angeles at midnight, and outside the streets looked like something out of the “Thriller” video. He said he wanted to talk to the people who had driven all this way to eat his food.

Mr. Lefebvre looked a little exhausted and chocolate-splotched, standing there as we sautéed him with praise and questions, mostly about the restaurant and what he planned to do with it next.

“There are many questions,” he said eventually, rocking on the heels of his clogs, his earrings flashing in the candlelight. His staff was bustling behind him, taking down all evidence of LudoBites. Gram & Papa’s would open in less than six hours.

Mr. Lefebvre laughed. “I’m 39 years old and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life,” he said. “So, who knows?”